Object-oriented JavaScript

Any project using JavaScript tend to quickly grow out of proportions and often results in very messy code. There are some good tools out there for making it easier to write and maintain JS code, one of which I like the best: CoffeScript. Using these kind of tools helps a lot, but today I’ll present one way of making JavaScript more readable.

By applying object-oriented programming to JavaScript, it’s readability, modularity and reusability are greatly improved. Object-oriented languages has been around since Simula appeared in 1967, and is used by some of the most common languages like C++, C# and Java.

As JavaScript does not have native support for classes, but is able to use anything as as variable there are a couple different methods of making classes in JS. I’ll present the one that I think is most intuitive. Let’s get to it.

Namespace definition

Using namespaces in JavaScript allows us to further separate the classes and avoids variable duplication. To do this, we need to define the namespaces as objects. To define the namespace “net.netxcius”, the following code is required:

varnet={nexcius:{}};

Class example

The following code defines our variable as a function. This is what will contain everything that we would normally place inside a class. The outermost function is called a self invoking function, this means that is calls itself upon creation. This is not required, but it has one great advantage: it can contain area specific global variables (Sarfraz Ahmed has a good blog post on this: Javascript Self Invoking Functions).
What is also worth mentioning is that the return object is what contains the public functions. These functions can of course access the local variables and functions. Here is the complete code for our class:

Usage

The final step is to create an instance of the class and check if it works. Following is the code used to call it and the results from the console:

varmyClass=newnet.nexcius.MyClass("This is the string",13);// Inside constructorconsole.log(myClass.getLocalNumber());// 13console.log(myClass.getLocalString());// This is the stringconsole.log(myClass.addNumbers(3,4));// 7

JavaScript projects gets cluttered very quick, hopefully this can aid you in keeping on top of your code. As always: If you have any questions or thoughts, please leave a comment and I’ll answer as soon as I can.